palestine news and politics

The family of an Israeli hostage who was gunned down by Israeli soldiers in Gaza say that they were not notified that an audio recording of him pleading for help had been leaked to the media.

Alon Shamriz, 26, was shot dead along with two other hostages, Yotam Haim, 28, and Samar Fouad Talalka, 24, after they had escaped their captors.

They were killed by Israeli forces as they approached them shirtless and waving a white cloth in the Gaza City neighbourhood of Shujaiya. A military spokesperson said that the men had been mistakenly identified as a threat.

Organizers of the event openly blocked non-Jews from entering the venue. In the parking lot they told an Arab looking man, who printed his event registration, that he could not enter because he wasn’t Jewish.

While it is illegal in Canada to discriminate based on religion or race, the police on site failed to intervene.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12732137

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees on Monday accused Israel of detaining and torturing some of its staffers, coercing them into making false confessions about the agency’s ties to Hamas.

“Some of our staff have conveyed to UNRWA teams that they were forced to (make) confessions under torture and ill-treatment. These false confessions were in response to questioning about relations between UNRWA and Hamas and involvement in the 7 October attack against Israel,” UNRWA spokeswoman Juliette Touma said in a statement.

Israel has accused at least 12 staffers from the UN Relief and Works Agency of being involved in the October 7 terrorist attacks and has alleged that about 12% of UNRWA’s 13,000 staffers are members of Hamas or other Palestinian militant groups. Israeli officials have said some of the information about the 12 staffers involved in October 7 was obtained through cell phone data and other sources. UNRWA says it has fired 10 of the 12 accused staffers and that the other two are dead. CNN cannot confirm the allegations.

According to the report released on Monday, one of those killed was a Palestinian man in Gaza City's Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February.

Eyewitnesses told the rights monitor that the man had his hands restrained, was stripped, and that he was alive while he was run over on asphalt.

Other similar incidents have also been carried out by the Israeli army, the rights monitor stated.

A disabled Palestinian man was killed with a "direct shot to the neck" while being held in a hospital by Israeli soldiers on the Gaza Strip, ITV News understands.

The shooting of Najeeb Salem Sadeq occurred just hours before ITV News captured footage of an unarmed civilian being shot dead while walking in a group waving a white flag, in the same area of Khan Younis.

The 39-year-old, who had severe learning difficulties, had fled to the nearby Al Khair hospital with his parents and siblings after the apartment block where they lived was hit by an artillery strike.

There, Najeeb was separated from his father - who was led away by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers already stationed at the hospital - and was held with a group of women, children, and older people due to his disability.

A leader of the militant West Bank settlement movement told him that Jews have a sacred duty to occupy all the land between “the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,” that nothing west of the Jordan River was ever “Arab place or property,” and that no Arabs, even citizens, should have civil rights in Israel. Stunning stuff, and extremely valuable to have on the record, especially given the settler movement’s close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

A month after Israeli allegations that a dozen United Nations staff were involved in the 7 October Hamas attack, UN investigators have yet to receive any evidence from Israel to support the claims, though they expect some material to be forthcoming “shortly”.

How odd to speak of a movement of the uncommitted. But at the moment in states such Michigan and Washington, the uncommitted are the vanguard of a political movement in defense of the Palestinian people from Israel’s genocidal war whose weapons are supplied by the United States. The horror of 30,000 dead in Gaza, half of them women and children, and the events such as the Israel’s provocation of a stampede of 120 people shot or trampled attempting to get food from trucks in a humanitarian aid convoy, are fueling a powerful movement for a ceasefire and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.

CHOMSKY: There were sharp differences in outlook between individuals. Many are hard to identify because they don’t speak out much, but we can compare, for example, the views of Secretaries of State William Rogers and Kissinger. Rogers’ view was that there should be a political settlement, meaning something like returning to the June ’67 borders, with a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, and various other conditions of demilitarization and national guarantees. Let’s call that a “two-state settlement.” When Kissinger took control of Middle East policy in the Fall of 1970 (according to his testimony), there was an abrupt switch in official American policy, from Rogers plan rhetoric to Kissinger rhetoric. Under Kissinger’s initiative, the United States by late 1970 abandoned even a rhetorical commitment to a political settlement and was clearly supporting a very different program, namely, the Israeli program of developing and ultimately annexing substantial parts of the occupied territories, a policy that led directly to the October 1973 war.

March 3 (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and forcefully pressed Israel to increase the flow of aid to ease what she called "inhumane" conditions and a "humanitarian catastrophe" among the Palestinian people. Harris's comments were among the sharpest yet by a senior leader of the U.S. government calling for Israel to alleviate the conditions in Gaza.

Health Ministry says “dozens” killed and wounded in “horrific massacre” of aid-seekers at Kuwaiti roundabout in Gaza City. Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 15 children have died in the past few days from malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City hours after UNICEF chief warned of acute malnutrition territory.

At least 15 Palestinian children died from dehydration and malnutrition at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip as Israel tightened a crippling blockade on the area, according to local health authorities.

“There are likely more children fighting for their lives somewhere in one of Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, and likely even more children in the north unable to obtain care at all,” Adele Khodr, UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

The report said the detainees included males and females whose ages ranged from 6 to 82. Some, the report said, died in detention.

The document includes accounts from detainees who said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.